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How-To Geek

Hard drives are getting larger and larger, but somehow they always seem to fill up. This is even more true if you’re using a solid-state drive (SSD), which offers much less hard drive space than traditional mechanical hard drives.

If you’re hurting for hard drive space, these tricks should help you free up space for important files and programs by removing the unimportant junk cluttering up your hard disk.

Run Disk Cleanup

Windows includes a built-in tool that deletes temporary files and other unimportant data. To access it, right-click one of your hard drives in the Computer window and select Properties.

Click the Disk Cleanup button in the disk properties window.

Select the types of files you want to delete and click OK. This includes temporary files, log files, files in your recycle bin, and other unimportant files.

You can also clean up system files, which don’t appear in the list here. Click the Clean up system files button if you also want to delete system files.

After you do, you can click the More Options button and use the Clean up button under System Restore and Shadow Copies to delete system restore data. This button deletes all but the most recent restore point, so ensure your computer is working properly before using it – you won’t be able to use older system restore points.

Uninstall Space-Hungry Applications

Uninstalling programs will free up space, but some programs use very little space. From the Programs and Features control panel, you can click the Size column to see just how much space each program installed on your computer is using.

If you don’t see this column, click the options button at the top right corner of the list and select the Details view. Note that this isn’t always accurate – some programs don’t report the amount of space they use. A program may be using a lot of space but may not have any information in its Size column.

Analyze Disk Space

To find out exactly what is using space on your hard drive, you can use a hard disk analysis program. These applications scan your hard drive and display exactly which files and folders are taking up the most space. We’ve covered the best 10 tools to analyze hard disk space, but if you want one to start with, try WinDirStat.

After scanning your system, WinDirStat shows you exactly which folders, file types, and files are using the most space. Ensure you don’t delete any important system files – only delete personal data files. If you see a program’s folder in the Program Files folder using a large amount of space, you can uninstall that program – WinDirStat can tell you just how much space a program is using, even if the Programs and Features Control Panel doesn’t.

Clean Temporary Files

Windows’ Disk Cleanup tool is useful, but it doesn’t delete temporary files used by other programs. For example, it won’t clear Firefox or Chrome browser caches, which can use gigabytes of hard disk space. (Your browser cache uses hard disk space to save you time when accessing websites in the future, but this is little comfort if you need the hard disk space now.)

For more aggressive temporary and junk file cleaning, try CCleaner, which you can download here. CCleaner cleans junk files from a variety of third-party programs and also cleans up Windows files that Disk Cleanup won’t touch.

Find Duplicate Files

You can use a duplicate-file-finder application to scan your hard drive for duplicate files, which are unnecessary and can be deleted. We’ve covered using VisiPics to banish duplicate images. If you want a tool that also checks for other types of duplicate files, try dupeGuru – the free version can only delete or move up to ten files at once, but it will show you what duplicate files are cluttering up your hard drive.

Reduce the Amount of Space Used for System Restore

If System Restore is eating up a lot of hard drive space for restore points, you can reduce the amount of hard disk space allocated to System Restore. The trade-off is you’ll have less restore points to restore your system from and less previous copies of files to restore. If these features are less important to you than the hard disk space they use, go ahead and free a few gigabytes by reducing the amount of space System Restore uses.

Nuclear Options

These tricks will definitely save some space, but they’ll disable important Windows features. We don’t recommend using any of them, but if you desperately need disk space, they can help:

Disable Hibernation – When you hibernate your system, it saves the contents of its RAM to your hard drive. This allows it to save its system state without any power usage – the next time you boot your computer, you’ll be back where you left of. Windows saves the contents of your RAM in the C:\hiberfil.sys file. To save hard drive space, you can disable hibernate entirely, which removes the file.

Comments (23)

Great article, this is the kind of stuff I love on HTG. If you keep
your system on a small SSD like me, it can be crucial. A few tips:

– Hibernate takes up as much space as you have RAM. If you don’t use
hibernate, there’s no reason to waste that space.
– The page file is rarely used unless you routinely use up your RAM,
and it takes multiple GB usually. It doesn’t hurt to move it to
another slower drive, or to disable it, as you’ve written elsewhere.
– When you run through everything else here and you’re still out of
space, and WinDirStat is telling you that it’s Windows’ Installer
directory that’s the problem, it’s time to get rid of the SP1
uninstaller. It’s in the built-in disk cleanup utility for C:. Tick
the box for Service Pack Backup Files. There’s also a command-line
command, google “dism”.
– You can move your Users folder to another drive using the Windows 7
installer disk, robocopy and mklink. Google “windows move users”.
When you do, change the registry entries for Default,
ProfilesDirectory and Public to the new drive in the ProfileList
registry key at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion. Go
through the subkeys and change the ProfileImagePath for any of the
Users accounts as well. I use this technique so I can put user
accounts on the bigger drive and do Acronis system images on C that
don’t include my user data. If my system gets infected I can restore
the image without wiping my user data.
– If you’re really tight and you use MS Office, you can use the same
robocopy/mklink technique (without having to boot from the installer
disc) for MSOCache. I try to avoid this since I want all programs to
be included in the system image, but MSOCache is a big waste so I can
tolerate making an exception for it.

I would also recommend people look at NTFS Junctions as a way to move big files from one drive (eg. small SSD) to a large drive without breaking existing installed applications. For example, my Steam folder is on my HDD because it’s hundreds of gigs in size.

A good tip:
For computers with a lot of RAM (like 16GB+) you can reduce the page file to something like 1 GB. By default it’s something like 1 or 1.5 times the amount of RAM. If you already have 16+ you probably won’t need to use it.

For some work and configurations you might need it but in those cases I suppose you know what to do.

Theese tips can be found in any book or on any website which deals with Windows hard disk space reduction, there is nothing new here. But: the greatest space eater is winsxs, it would have been nice to mention it, in a Windows 7 machine it can eat 10+ gigabytes.

Another problem which also could be great if You had mentioned it: there is a new fashion today, the application installer copies the whole install stuff into a hidden directory, so if You even install one component, the whole thing remains on Your drive. Rad Studio 2007 was a good example, it copied everything into a hidden directory from Your DVD, and even if You only installed Delphi and not C++, the whole install stuff remained on Your drive. if You find it by chance, and delete it, then You can never uninstall the application, only by hand.

Also another problem: the uninstallers leave very much garbage after itself, even the whole apllication directory remains intact on the drive, not to mention the many (frequently hidden) directories and files in “Documents and Settings” on XP or in Users on Windows 7. The registry is another mess, the uninstallers leave the whole unusable garbage after them.

And another one: language files. Java (Netbeans and the like), Adobe programs and many other programs install huge language files even if I do not need them. I use English and maybe Hungarian language when working on a computer, why I should keep Chinese fonts or Tamil message files on my hard drive. Nobody cares it how much space occupied by such files.

If you’re familiar with a tiny aplication called sdelete you could save/free some space. It’s the command sdelete – c from a command box. Especially if you are experimenting with virtualization.
Nice article by the way

There’s no magic program to remove all garbage from your systems & everyone has a fav system cleaner program, mine is “ASC Pro” for the meantime, which seems to work fine for them.
More importantly, become familiar with all folders & sub folders (& their contents) in Explorer –go through this on occasion, learning as you go. It’ll show you where all needed & unnecessary files are located. There are some excellent sites available to research & verify file info.

Like anything of value, the more time you put into it; the better results you will get.

CC Cleaner has the quickest registry scanner as a menu selction on it’s interface screen. It may not be complete, but it will find and remove most useless, obsolete, or leftover install crap in the registry- it’s really great to use right after you delete a program or sizable file. Also Free Unistaller actually shows you what’s deletable by making the targte text red. I use about three different tools for the registry, and what’s funny is each can find stuff the other didn’t!

Don’t use your hard drive for dead storage. If the file hasn’t been accessed in six months, move it to a DVD, a flash drive or an external HD. Chances are good you won’t need to look at it there, either, but at least it won’t be taking up space on your main drive.

Didnt see it mentioned but the recycle bin eats up a lot of HDD space. Simply right click on the recycle bin and choose properties. By default it will use 10% of your drive. That doesn’t sound like a lot but if you have a 2TB drive you are talking about a 20GB loss. more like 18 cause they lie about sizes but HTG has covered that topic pretty well already.

my computer is running slow have done all the checks done the registry etc etc, but still find it very slow , they tell me there will be programs running in t he back ground that do this can you help me with this problem cheers Ann ps love this site its teaching me so much thank you

GEEK TRIVIA

DID YOU KNOW?

There are more possible iterations of a game of Chess (game-tree complexity) than there are atoms in the known universe–calculations put the number of atoms in the universe at roughly 10^81 and the number of possible moves in a game of chess at 10^123.